This page needs to be proofread.

PRAGMATISM. 485 century, that enable philosophy to overcome at least partially that Dualism between Eeason and Will with which Kant left us in his two great Critiques, although that Dualism still survives in the case of those who seem to think that they can save the reality of some important facts (e.g., religious experience, or social progress) by attempting to put them on a supra-rational or anti-rational basis, or in the case of some others who seem to think that they render philosophy service by insisting upon the difference between philosophy proper (or metaph ysic) as an explanation of the world for the intellect l and a common-sense (?) account of the world as we apprehend it in our practical experience overlooking altogether the fact that has recently been so completely re-demonstrated by Mr. Bradley that : " The mere intellect has shown itself 1 There is a trace of this sharp distinction in Prof. Watson's article, although he is careful to guard against misinterpretation. He is quite right in insisting that philosophy is not experience but the theory of experience, and quite right in insisting upon the difference between philosophy and art and life and religion, etc. But even this line of reflexion may be pursued too far, for I arn afraid that Prof. Watson's excessive care to insist that " ' truth ' is never ' reality,' and ' reality ' is never ' truth,' " and that there " can be no philosophy which does not presuppose the reality of which it is the theory " might leave upon the minds of some readers an impression that "reality "is somehow "outside" thought (an idea which he of course would rightly regard as pernicious and fatal, if it is not absurd). I mean that philosophy should profess to be more than a mere study of truth, that it should profess to study reality and should claim to give the only genuinely objective and universally true statement about reality. The world always will (and its instinct in this cannot be called unsound or impertinent) insist upon its right to take the results of metaphysicians en bloc and to test them in the light of the version of reality that they seem to countenance. It still judges, e.g. of the English neo-Hegelian metaphysic as giving men a shadowy rather than a substantial account of the real (as giving a " stone when they ask for " bread") a criticism that cannot be turned by the assertion that philo- sophy can never give anything but a conceptual analysis of reality. If it cannot, men will reject philosophy, and where then can they go ? for nowhere else can they get anything but particularised and limited accounts of reality statements rather about particular sets of relations in the world than about the world as a whole. It does not (to take an example of Prof. Watson's, p. 431) seem to me " an abandonment of philosophy altogether " to tell people that, " if we are to lay hold upon reality and lift ourselves out of the flux of phenomena, we must do so by a species of assurance different from knowledge " (he here quotes some " ethical " idealist). This last statement might be a perfectly natural corollary of a doctrine of the real (a doctrine that seems to be increasingly obtaining credence), i.e., the doctrine that the real ultimately consists of the activities of personal bevngs (or beings destined to become personal). Philosophy is a reflexion upon the world as a whole and upon all kinds of experience, volitional as well as cognitive even if volitional experience represents something that is done rather than thought.